In the 44 years since, the OSPD has been revised six times, adding thousands of new words. A seventh edition was released earlier this month. It includes headline-grabbers like COVID, VAX, and DOX (and VAXX and DOXX), and a lowercase variant of JEDI. Also in: GUAC, INSPO, ZOODLE, and SKEEZY. “You’ve got some fun new words,” said Peter Sokolowski, editor at large of Merriam-Webster Inc., which has published the OSPD since its inception.
Hidden by the buzz over the latest lingo, though, is an underlying truth about chronicling our ever-evolving language: The American dictionary business is slowly dying. Of the publishers of the OSPD’s five original source books, Merriam-Webster is the last with a staff of full-time lexicographers producing regular, robust updates, all of it now online. The others are either defunct or ghost works updated rarely and modestly by freelance lexicographers, and have either no web presence or a stagnant one; a recent print edition of one of them boasted “dozens” of new words and senses, which is not a lot of new words and senses. (Merriam does issue new printings of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the primary Scrabble sourcebook and the basis for its free online dictionary, with some of its new words, but the last full overhaul in print was an 11th edition published in 2003.)
During the past two centuries, educators, psychologists, toy companies and parents like us have acted, implicitly or otherwise, as if the purpose of play is to optimise children for adulthood. The dominant model for how to do that has been the schoolhouse, with its reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. The more book learning we could doll up as play, and then cram into our children, the better. Then, with the rise of neuroscience in the second half of the 20th century, toys were increasingly marketed and purchased for the purpose of building better brains in order to build more competitive and successful grownups – to make Homo sapiens that were a little more sapient.
The pressure to do that has been felt most intensely with the youngest kids, aged five and under, and in recent decades the market has bestowed upon us such brands as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius and Fat Brain (tagline: “Toys that Matter to Their Gray Matter”). By 2020, the broad category of educational toys was making nearly $65bn (£55bn) worldwide, a figure that is forecast to double within the decade. Toys that teach – from the Speak & Spell and the See ’n Say to an entire phylum of learn-to-code robots – now pervade many young lives. “This generation of parents is asking toys to provide an end product, and that end product is prosperity,” Richard Gottlieb, an influential toy industry consultant, told me. “They want toys to get their children into Harvard.”
The obvious solution to this problem—at least to anyone who's read any Arthur C. Clarke novels or watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey—is to slow the metabolism of crew members so they only need to ingest a bare minimum of resources while in transit. In 2001, astronauts lie down in sarcophagus-like hibernation pods, where their hearts beat just three times a minute and their body temperature hovers at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Bradford has devoted a huge chunk of his 21-year career at SpaceWorks to investigating a question that Kubrick had the artistic license to ignore: How, exactly, can we safely power down a human body so it's just one step removed from death, then revive it on demand?
There's something fascinating about the water component — it's the bulk of the cooking process, it doesn't require you to be in the kitchen for the entirety, but it's unique to repeatedly cook down, add water, cook it out, allowing water to evaporate and concentrate the flavors over and over, until the sauce is so immensely flavored and rich that you must eat it post haste.
For all my understanding of the body, nothing about medicine or science has explained the abstract part of our being which defines the self, the very nature of being alive. Chemically, biologically, we can dissect every part of the human body and explain its mechanisms to the core. Spiritually, we all believe different things about how we come to exist in the universe. In truth, I don’t know that it matters if we are certain in our knowledge of either. At the end of the day, we live as best we can until we become obsolete.
From almost the first line, the author addresses the complexities of the task, declaring that most of us will begin this book with ‘the fatal illusion of believing we know what an emperor is’ (xiii). The major concern of In the Shadow of the Gods is the idea of the character of a ruler, allowing the reader to understand how empires functioned and why some were ultimately successful when others were not. In this manner, the book is a fine addition to scholarship on the concept of a ruler in its various forms and the systems in which they worked.
An assured book, The Song of the Cell is free of overly complex detail that would submerge the reader. The result is a confident, timely – and most importantly, biologically precise – exploration of what it means to be human.
Each day the same now:
I wake her up—she’s a woman
in the making, and me,
I’m still a boy, given this responsibility